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I dunno. I think what you get in Ballard's stuff isn't so much his cruel and vicious side, more just a complete absence of sentimentality. He often talks about arriving in the UK after the War and just being shocked by the state of the place, the drabness, the parochial Little England attitudes and so on, which after his experiences makes a certain amount of sense, and you could possibly see his work since then, at least to an extent, as a sort of one-man crusade against anything to do with the kind of post-Victorian middle class niceties of culture ( read, denial, ) he must have run into back then. So I always have the feeling that however deranged his characters get, he sort of oddly approves of them, in the weirdest way, for at least having the courage of their convictions. And that he doesn't exactly relish the violence ( well, except in Crash, ) more just sees it as necessary, and so presents it in this strangely affectless, off-hand style.
Then again, this is the same man who once said, about Crash I think, that he wanted " to rub the human face in it's own vomit and then force it to look in the mirror, " so I could be a bit off the point here.
And granted, the prose can be a bit awkward. |
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